Archive for the ‘Civil Liberties’ Category

I have had a rough, very rough day with some very, very mindlessly stupid & ignorant local government issue/people – i.e my local council behaving like a total idiot & demonstrating all that it pure evil and destructive about bureaucracy.

It’s very similar to the revolting Windrush issue currently making the news where Theresa May was previously in charge of the Home Office and directed it to behave in an execrable way towards various immigrants & in particular West Indian ones from the 1950’s. What happened there demonstrates how nasty & dishonest government really is; it just takes your breath away really !

All Theresa May was interested in when she was the Minister in charge of the Home Office was her personal gain of political ‘Brownie Points’ & more voters for her political party. So her focus was entirely on throwing any immigrant out of the country she could lay her hands on & she organised mobile advertising hoardings on trucks with threatening messages towards ‘illegal’ immigrants, by which she meant anyone in this country without paperwork proving who they were. This might include virtually anyone and possibly vast numbers of people who had lived here for decades or even been born here & lived their entire lives in this country.

The advertising was so implicitly racist too it positively takes your breath away with it virtually saying ‘go home you illegal immigrant black bastards; otherwise we’ll find you, instantly arrest you and throw you out of the country immediately’. My wording here is almost exactly the same as the actual ads which did not actually have the word ‘bastards’ but it’s absence only made it more potently spring out of the ghastly, primitive and ugly fascist wording of the ads and the behaviour being demonstrated at Theresa May’s command.

What she did was immoral, entirely unlawful, nasty, brutish and downright wicked, just like any good Fascist. But like all typical bureaucrats she didn’t care at all. I’m just doing my job she said and lied to Parliament about it recently. But the Press found out she lied & now she is in big trouble about it and is busy making the current Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, who is now in charge of the Home Office, take the blame for her own miserable, awful, appalling, dishonest behaviour.

But what idiot Theresa May did not do when she was in charge of the Home Office and it was neccessary to reduce the increasingly silly tidal wave of immigration into the UK as it was rapidly getting out of control and would ultimate end up with about a billion immigrants from the most poverty struck areas of the World all wanting to live in the UK & swamp it with their potentially limitless numbers, was for her to do anything intelligent at all in simply doing all the obvious things to control it. The UK has a ruddy great water filled moat around it which makes controlling immigration relatively easy if you apply a bit of common sense to the problem.

But, of course, common sense is something bureaucrats lack. Personal integrity is another thing it is essential bureaucrats do not possess as that would make it difficult for them to do their ‘job’ in the mindlessly stupid & ignorant way they frequently do.

Theresa May is an incompetent fool, a proven liar, and a disgrace to Parliament and the Conservative Party.

Apparently, we used to have population of about 60 million and gradually falling a few short years ago in the UK and it has now shot up to about 68 million as a direct result of recent uncontrolled immigration.

With eight million more people to house it isn’t surprising the cost of housing has shot up too so that now a home costs about four times ( in real terms) what it cost about twenty years ago. Homes used to cost about three times a person’s annual income. Now it’s rapidly approaching twelve times in some areas. There simply isn’t enough housing to go around.

It seems this country is hurtling towards being a fascist State with most of the population denied any sort of proper justice as a corrupt Government steamrollers over citizens by tightening the screws of oppression little by little so people barely notice until it is too late.

The two articles below aptly described my own first hand experiences and so I copied them from solicitors Clarke Kiernan website:

The Lord Chancellor introduced a measure that will impact significantly on any person who finds themselves involved with the Magistrates’ Courts on any road traffic matter such as speeding, careless driving, or any other technical or low level breach of the law where the incident occurs after 12th April 2015. The idea was said to be ‘to make criminals pay for the criminal justice system’. He called it the Criminal Courts Charge.

In reality, the people who will be paying will be those ordinary working people who make a simple error and who, because they are normally law abiding, will have the income or assets to pay this extra cost. Regular offenders will tend not to have any income or assets to meet the payment. Non payment of this penalty is punishable by imprisonment no matter how low level the allegation.

If your case goes to court and you fight the allegation believing in your innocence or simply wanting to explain the circumstances to reduce the penatly, if the magistrates disagree with you they must order you to pay an extra £520 for the privilege of having the case tested, no matter how brief the hearing. The charges increase if the case gets to the crown court no matter how it gets there.

Nowadays ordinary law abiding people will have to make decisions on whether to accept a fixed penalty or whether to make false admissions for a police caution based on financial considerations rather than guilt due to the clear threat that now exists of a large extra financial penalty no matter how low level the misdemeanour or punishment.

Often people will not have taken legal advice and will not understand that taking a police caution for an allegation of eg common assault or petty theft will be recorded as a criminal record by the police and will disqualify you from many occupations, from helping out at your child’s school, restrict travel to other countries…

This is not an idea to make criminals pay, it is a way to make ordinary people pay for a system that is part of the State and payable by the State. It is an indirect further tax on working families. It is tarring people with the ‘criminal’ label indiscriminately. The impact is to convict more people, more easily and more cheaply whether or not they are guilty of a crime.

Excuse us if we rant in a direction you do not agree with. A quote from Megarry J in the case of John v Rees [1970] Ch. 345, Ch D and which was re-used in Moss v The Queen [2013] 1 WLR 3884, PC sets out a philosophy that we like:

“It may be that there are some who would decry the importance which the courts attach to the observance of the rules of natural justice. ‘When something is obvious,’ they may say, ‘why force everybody to go through the tiresome waste of time involved in framing charges and giving an opportunity to be heard? The result is obvious from the start.’ Those who take this view do not, I think, do themselves justice. As everybody who has anything to do with the law well knows, the path of the law is strewn with examples of open and shut cases which, somehow, were not; of unanswerable charges which, in the event, were completely answered; of fixed and unalterable determinations that, by discussion, suffered a change.”

If you look at what has been happening to the Criminal Justice System (as well as the civil system) for some years you ought to wonder how consecutive Governments can get away with concentrating on the administration of the systems to the undoubted detriment of Justice. It has become more important to Government to convict members of the public quickly and cheaply. Not only are defendants and their lawyers put under pressure to prepare the cases against them rather than trust the crown prosecution service and police to do their jobs. No longer are the prosecutors expected to do their job; Government seems to have given up on them and decided that the best, easiest, cheapest way of convicting people is to get the people to carrry out sufficient work for the prosecution that they evenutally convict themselves – guilty or not.

The protection people had was with defence lawyers who would stand up for and protect the person’s rights. Government sorted that one out. The legal aid system is being destroyed so that those who cannot afford to pay for representation have to make use of lawyers who are underpaid and overworked. It might be denied by Government and by legal aid lawyers but it is simple business sense that you get what you paid for.

Not only has Government reduced remuneration for the legal aid lawyer to a ridiculous level but they intend to do the same again and also to reduce the number of firms able to carry out the work on legal aid. The service is to be reduced to a level most people will not believe until they (unexpectedly) find themselves in need of the assistance and discover that if they want to see their solicitor outside of the Court to prepare their case and take advice so that you are ready for the hearing then you will probably find you have to travel to the other end of your county where you will see a young, inexperienced, support staff member because the firm will not be able to afford to employ enough solicitors of quality to service the work at the level people will need in order to assert their rights.

In order to achieve what the government wants to see happen to criminal defence work it is essential that they not only reduce the number of firms, they also need to ensure firms have the minimum number of solicitors and maximum unqualified support staff and then to get the price even lower the firms will not be required to have any offices. Those who can afford to instruct good firms like ours will do so much better than those who have to manage on legal aid. That is not in fact the criminal justice system we like to see. It is not the system our government should be forcing upon us.

In order to see the ways in which Government has managed to increase the burdens on defendants to convict themselves you only need to study the Criminal Procedure Rules that are carefully drafted to add to burdens for defendants in a way that ignores and overrides their statutory protections. Notwithstanding that the prosecution takes months usually to bring a case to court for the first hearing, they are encouraged to give minimum disclosure of the case the defendant is expected to meet at the first hearing but the defendant is then expected (compelled) to identify all issues they will want to rely upon notwithstanding the disclosure is inadequate and there has been no opportunity to investigate matters, check availability of witnesses, seek any expert evidence or just generally give decent instructions and take good advice. There is no leeway given for people whose first language is not English or have mental health and/or learning difficulties.

from a parent exasperated with the appalling quality of State education in the UK.

Dear Head Teacher,

With regard to the detention my son received for writing a ’cheeky’ comment when the IT ‘technician ’ logged him off the internet yesterday.

I spoke further at length to my son about this incident and I am unhappy about the issue as follows.

I understand that he is being punished for being cheeky and I have absolutely no argument with that, but I am unhappy about him being logged off the internet because it appears to have been ill considered, inappropriate and, perhaps, downright silly & bureaucratic if his explanations are correct – and they seem to be.

My son tells me that in the IT lesson he was required by the IT teacher to produce a powerpoint presentation, to include illustrations. This involved legitimately accessing the internet to acquire relevant images to illustrate the presentation.

He wrote the two words in the Google search box ‘Troll Comic’ to specifically access an image he had previously seen which he wished to use for this presentation, the subject of which was racism. I questioned him closely about this and he showed me this image when I googled it and it is clearly exactly the right image that would be appropriate in my son’s mind to illustrate the presentation as he explained to me. He told me it was a suitable cartoon image which clearly appeared to be a ‘black’ person and my son intended obtaining a similar type of image but illustrating a ‘white caucasian’.

It was therefore quite wrong for my son to have been arbitrarily logged off the internet and the ‘technician’ should have had the common sense to enquire of him why he appeared to be just googling comics to apparently – in the mind of the technician – read them in a lesson which would have then constituted an inappropriate use of the internet. But the technician failed to do their job properly in this respect.

It is therefore quite understandable why my son thought this was stupid and was consequentially irritated. This triggered my son’s response of ‘cheekiness’ in writing a silly comment – ‘stop watching me you pervert’ – as his natural response.

I have pointed out to him that he should have written a non-cheeky, more intelligent reply and perhaps bothered to explain why he had googled that search term. But he didn’t because children are immature and behave accordingly. He now agrees with me he was wrong and that it was immature and he should have written a more mature comment which would have resolved the issue more intelligently.

My son also told me he thought it was always pointless trying to defend himself against ‘wrong’ disciplinary accusations from the school and he never did this because it had always been his experience that it just got him into even more trouble in the end – even if he had been blameless in the first place.

This is something he has often repeated over many years and different schools and I know of some past incidents whereby my son has been absolutely blameless about something, but ‘has accepted the rap’ rather than try and defend himself. I think this is wrong and demonstrates an inadequacy of disciplinary procedures and it was not the generally the experience I remember as a child.

This demonstrates the law of unintended consequences which is probably the single most defining evil of bureaucracy and the stupidity of the bureaucratic mind.

When my son explained how the school has a system of ‘policing’ the internet by means of having a full time ‘technician’ sitting hunched up over a computer all day randomly monitoring any IT lessons or other computer access by pupils, I was, frankly, astonished at the waste of money this represents and the nightmare overtones of Orwellian surveillance and thinking and apparent need to battle with the pupils perceived remorseless disobedience in inappropriately accessing the internet.

It seemed to me inconceivable that the average private school would waste the cost of a full time salary in this manner, or that it would accept that pupils were so uncontrollable that this was the only suitable option.

I just found it offensive to see what I perceive as the sort of State type control freak bureaucracy being used to deal with an issue, as opposed to the more sane solutions used by the more sensible world of the non-governmental, non-State world which tends to do things more sensibly and effectively.

I would make the point that simply making efforts to physically prevent pupils from accessing the internet inappropriately is probably utterly pointless because while you can do this in one environment such as either school or home, this will merely encourage pupils to be even more determined to inappropriately access it elsewhere, such as friends houses, mobile devices etc.

It is quite obviously physically impossible to completely prevent pupils inappropriately accessing the internet for this reason and therefore it is simply pointlessly bureaucratic and actually more harmful in the longer term to waste time and money to effectively actually encourage pupils to do the very thing you don’t want them to do in the first place.

Like drugs, it can’t be stopped in this blunderbuss, mindlessly coercive & bureaucratic kind of way; only by properly educating people can appropriate behaviour be achieved.

The only way to prevent any form of ‘crime’ or inappropriate behaviour is to train people’s minds to be moral and law abiding etc and not to seek to achieve this effect by force, fear or the violent and repressive coercion of authority, because this will almost certainly achieve exactly the opposite effect.

It has always been the responsibility of the teacher taking a class to ensure any pupil is not doing anything ‘inappropriate’ and to employ a third party ‘policeman’ sounds horribly Orwellian and 1984’ish – with these unintended consequences I mention which have been wasting money on a salary, wasting your time, the time of the class teacher, my time, and alienating the pupil and the parent, and generally leaving a bad taste in everybody’s mouth. All the typical consequences of bad management and bureaucracy.

Which is why I am writing this.

Yours Sincerely,

From a parent exasperated by the futile and bad management of State schools providing a lousy standard of education to UK children by the mindless pursuit of bureaucracy instead of getting on with the real business of genuinely trying to provide a decent education.

The State education system is idiotic, bad and utterly sub-standard in just about every respect and, like many parents I am completely appalled at it.

Tony Blair and and his poisonous government of obnoxious self interested, corrupt little prigs with chips on their shoulders on the make – that’s who ! Years and years of socialist destruction have wrecked Britain, leaving it a traumatised society wrecked and torn apart, impoverised and brutalised by State control of every aspect of daily life.

Successive Labour Governments have steadily eroded everyone’s stake in society as socialism sought to control more and more of the population with it’s Big Brother State of bureaucratic nightmare proportions. Control of everything was the Labour Government mantra as squirming tentacles of government interference reached out everywhere in the Tony Blair and Gormless Gordon years.

The bottom end of British society was where Tony Blair and his destructive cronies caused the most damage, luring the poorer people with endlessly false promises which just trapped them in greater poverty and deprivation as the merely filthy rich became obscenely rich at everyone else’s expense and with lots of help from labour Party pals running the country only for their own benefit.

What a miserably despicable bunch of looters they were !

They looted Britain of self respect, of dignity, of prosperity and integrity. They looted the the pockets of the poor so the rich might become even richer, while those stuck in the middle were looted of opportunity, as well as the poor who were also looted of every hope they might have once had.

I discovered your existence because of a mention in my son’s school newsletter.

I have always been interested in go karting since I used them at my boarding school as a kid, so I thought I would visit your website to find out details including cost so my son & I could go Karting.

You have succeeded in infuriating me beyond measure by:

– failing to provide sensible cost information on your website that I can find – which means it almost certainly doesn’t exist there; thereby deliberately forcing me to telephone you to find out necessary details in order to discover whether you are worth using or not.

– then, stunningly, only providing an 0844 telephone number which is a very expensive premium telephone number I will have to pay extra for in order for your business to receive part of the extra cost of my telephone call I am now forced by you to pay by the even more dishonest telephone network which has tempted you into this completely dishonest scam.

This is just so when the unsuspecting public make ordinary routine telephone calls to you to find out if they really want to be one of your customers, or to make any other enquiry they need to make, they will be milked of huge amounts of money most of them will have no idea is being conned out of them.

– This kind of weasel minded greed businesses like you use to con extra money out of an unsuspecting public when they innocently want to make ordinary, simple, everyday telephone calls they have already paid for with their own telephone accounts is wickedly mean minded and just plain disgusting.

It is dishonest and it is wrong.

So I won’t be using you after all. Nor will other people who become equally annoyed at your devious minded greed.